Well Pete, I am sorry. Heartbreaking news, really. But the drums are rolling and mainland Europeans, speaking all kinds of strange languages, are marching onto the battle field. US and UK sites may well be outnumbered in 2002 by mainland European dotcoms, hopefully in both a local language and English, but that may not always be the case. Being a dot com carries prestige over here, ever since Time Magazine put "The rise of the dotcoms" on their front page.

If you check the "translations" thread in the forum for European SE:s you will find some helpful ideas on this subject.

The flip side of the coin is that our American, Asian, African and Antipodean friends are now starting to "work" the European engines. Things aren't going to get any easier over here either, as you can see pete is already getting his retaliation ready.

Well, if Antipodeans and others create sites in the 40 or so languages spoken in Europe and keep them both in .com and .local-country they are most welcome. That is what it takes to get a top ranking in a European SE.

In fact I am looking forward to Pete spending some money over here and see big profits on the horizon. He and thousands of others may well create a huge business for web translators and European SE specialists. Welcome all! Bring your credit cards!

As to UK being a part of Europe, the jury is still out. Tories say no and labour says yes. On the top page of this most excellent forum, there is a choice between UK Search Engines and European Search Engines, so I guess Brett is a tory. Might earn him tea at Buckingham Palace, who knows? ;-)

Speaking for us Southern Africans, these markets have traditionally been the breadwinner for us in terms of tourism and we all know what % tourism makes up of the SEO diet.

Have you guys ever had a look at the band aid engines in Africa? Forget first generation, I reckon their engineering is about on a par with 70's clothing and 80's music.

So, we have no choice but to turn to the international engines :).

Seriously though, it would be interesting to know what % of online users in a country like sweden turn to search results in their mother tongue as opposed to results in English when looking for a foreign product.

Pete: I'm not sure I know what an African band aid engine is, but I gather that whatever it is, your are not happy with it. (Freeware set up on a cheap low bandwidth server?) Gimme an URL so I can learn.

There is an interesting item here. Africa has 3.1 million Internet users out of a population of over 650 million and so is not out of the starting blocks yet. (South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria alone account for more than two thirds with 1.8, 0.4 and 0.1 million users respectively.)The question is this: Will the big US engines have the national African SE-markets under total control by the time they get rolling, or will we see new national engines, serving national interests in the future.

As to languages used by Swedes when searching. Ask me again in 6 months and I will give you an exact answer. Meanwhile, look at [evreka.passagen.se...] for a couple of minutes. Should give you a rough idea. But remember, no other non-English speaking people in Europe speak English to the same extent as Swedes. 8 years of English in school or more for almost all of us, subtitles rather than dubbing in TV and so on. So when looking for a foreign product, almost all would search in English. (But a doorway in Swedish is an awfully nice touch though, if you are trying to sell something.)